I must admit, it’s been quite a struggle to get up to speed with the various, generally incongruous, pieces of managing what is collectively known as the News & Record Web sites.
We market jobs/careers, shopping, autos and homes differently and that makes for a tough sell to advertisers and users alike.
There are three things, though, that are in my sights as far as needing a major overhaul:
- Search
- Calendar/events
- Project management
The latter we’ve been transforming since the first of the year. After evaluating several PM tools, we settled on QuickBase by the folks at Intuit, the makers of Quicken for consumers and QuickBooks for business and TurboTax. This Web-based application is scalable to meet your needs. You can choose from their templated applictions or create your own. You can keep applications just for your workgroup or you can open them to everyone on the ‘net. The payment model is based on the number of users, so you can have hundreds of applications for only a few users if needed. It’s helping us tremendously with ongoing projects and tasks.
We’ve partnered with a Silicon Valley company Artsopolis for our new Scene calendar, but we still maintain separate calendars for print. The ideal situation would be to have all of our content in on large database and to be able to reverse publish back to the print publication. We’re moving in that direction by pushing Artsopolis to create an export we can run through a series of scripts to make print publishing easier.
Why we’re in the situation we are with search, I’m not sure, but we’ve been sending our search provider XML feeds for some of our online content. And those feeds haven’t been full-text only summaries of content. We’ve had them begin scraping our sites to provide a complete search experience and we’re going to incorporate a better archive search experience, too.
Along with a redesign of our main site, News-record.com, look for these changes in the next three months.
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